there’s no legal requirement for even a formal statement to the Secretary of State from the candidate withdrawing;

The only requirement is notice from the district political party.

All summed, this means that under current law and practice, an “illness” could easily be “acute political undesirability”, and the only diagnostician the chair of the district party. This means that the entire political primary process in North Dakota can be subverted and replaced once again with smoke-filled rooms.

And Mr. Schreiner, if you’re actually sick and tired of dealing with this BS, I hope you get well soon, and you’re not suffering from any lack of health insurance like so many people I know.

It seems clear that Québec wasn’t voting for the PQ or CAQ so much as against Charest, and only by a thin margin at that. For left-leaning federalists, the choice was to settle for the social policies of the PQ, or the CAQ, for its… well, it’s best to say non-sovereigntism rather than federalism.

The hypothesis that the provincial Liberal Party was going the way of the dodo might only have been surely proven with a solid federalist, social democratic party challenging the race. That party ought to have been the NPD.

The 2011 federal elections broke the NPD into the province, but failed to put up candidates for the National Assembly; Mulcair has promised to do so next time. Perhaps the NPD will try to snag some disaffected backbenchers to bolster its candidates at the next election. Because that’s basically any time, given a 56-19-50 vote split.